by Jason Vail
“Yes,” said Edith, who had no idea there had ever been a dead man in the privy, “what’s he doing there?”
“I suppose we shall have to see,” Stephen said, although he had no wish to see at all. “It’s dark in there. I wonder how anyone can see anything.” It was rather dark yet, being just sun up, with the yard still in shadow, the air cool and, except near the privy, fresh with spring. While people were accustomed to such smells, it was sharper than usual in the privy’s vicinity, and Stephen wished for a scented rag to hold over his mouth. As the inn was the better sort, there was a bowl of such rags by the door for that purpose, but as quite a few of the spectators were armed with them, he doubted any were left.
“I’ll fetch a candle,” Edith said. “Mark!” she called to one of the grooms. “Fetch a candle!”
Mark did not move from his spot near the privy door. “Jennie!” he called to Gilbert’s daughter. “Fetch a candle!”
“Fetch it yourself!” Jennie snapped. “You’ve no leave to give me orders.”
“You’re a girl!” Mark said.
Jennie crossed her arms and glowered.
Realizing that Jennie would not be moved and seeing a similar glower on Edith’s face, Mark slipped away toward the inn.
Gilbert sighed, slid his hands into his sleeves and rested them on his ample belly, which gave him a monk-like appearance. He leaned close and whispered in Stephen’s ear, “I suppose it would come out one day, you know. I always did. I laid up nights worrying about it.”
“Say nothing, Gilbert,” Stephen said. “We don’t know who he is or how he got there.”
“Ah, yes, of course we don’t. How could we, after all?”
Mark returned from the inn bearing a lantern, a candle burning inside. He handed the lantern to Stephen. “There you go, sir. Enjoy.”
“Mark is spending too much time with Harry,” Stephen said to Gilbert.
“That’s your fault, not mine. I’ve told you time and again, Harry’s a bad influence. Look at the trouble he’s caused Jennie.”
Not wishing to debate this point, wishing instead that he was miles away, but not having any choice in the matter, Stephen stepped to the privy’s threshold. He removed the candle from the lantern and held it up to illuminate the interior, although even as he did so, he saw there was enough light to see into the privy pit. A pale hand was clearly visible down in the foul muck. As Stephen bent over for a better view, he made out an arm attached to the hand, a shoulder, and part of a face, only the jaw and lips, long hair concealing the rest.
Stephen took a deep breath despite the choking odor, and stepped back into the comparatively cleaner air of the yard. “He’s fresh,” he said to Gilbert.
“Oh, thank God!” Gilbert gasped. The fellow they had put in the pit should be nothing but bones by now.
“Thank God?” Edith asked, incredulous. “You’re glad we’ve a dead man in the privy? Think what that might mean for business!”
“Before we worry about that,” Gilbert said, greatly relieved, “we shall have to determine how he got there. We might have no fault in it.”
“Well then,” Edith said, ever practical, “you’ll have to fetch him out, won’t you.”
“I am afraid we shall,” Gilbert sighed.
Pulling a dead man from a privy pit was not the sort of chore men relished, so it took some time to round up anyone willing to do it. After some negotiation, John Hapgood and his son Ralph agreed, but only if they were paid. As they were night soil collectors this business did not seem too far removed from their usual work. Then there was a dispute over who should pay, but it came down to the fact that it was the Wistwodes’ privy, so they should bear the burden, not the neighborhood. Edith did not like this solution, but having been overruled by the collective will of her neighbors, she went back to the inn to fret over the expense after paying John and Ralph more money than they earned in the normal week.
John and Ralph went at it with surprising efficiency. With a pair of ropes and iron hooks, they had the corpse out of the pit without much fuss, having only dropped it once on the way up, and laid on the ground before the privy threshold, and were calling for soap and buckets of water to clean themselves up that had been laid nearby for this purpose.
More buckets had been prepared to wash the filth off the body. This chore fell to Gilbert and Mark, who applied the contents of the buckets to the dead man in an almost dainty way, careful not to splash themselves, and dancing to avoid the nasty rivulets that drained away from the body.
The body, now somewhat clean, lay on its back. The man appeared to be in his forties from the gray shot through his black hair and the lines around his nose and mouth. The face itself was lean and long, the neck lean as well with a prominent Adam’s apple. He wore a blue tunic, which had buttons at the shoulders which could be undone so the arms could be freed from the sleeves, a woolen shirt beneath the tunic, and green stockings. A tooled belt secured the tunic and shirt at the waist. The belt held a knife, but there was no purse, which normally would reside beside the knife, only what appeared to be the strings to support the purse. His boots were stout and made for walking. It was the sort of ensemble worn by the craftsmen of any town.
“All right then,” Stephen said, his voice muffled by the scented rag he had commandeered from a spectator. He flicked strands of hair from the man’s face with a short stick. “Anybody know him?”
An elderly man in the assembled spectators held up his hand.
“And you are?” Stephen asked.
“Edward Shapley is my name, of Hereford.” Shapley gestured to the body. “And that’s Nicholas Feyn, without any doubt. And I for one am not surprised that he met his end in this way. If any man deserved it, he did.”
“You did not get along, I take it?”
“Feyn never got along with anyone. He was a quarrelsome, angry man who blamed everyone else but himself for his misfortune.”
“I suppose he had a great share of that, then.”
Shapley nodded. “It wasn’t for want of talent. He had a great store of that, but he squandered what God gave him through gambling, drink and chasing other men’s wives.”
“What sort of talent?”
“He was a goldsmith, though he never rose higher than journeyman. The masters of the Hereford guild never trusted him as a fellow.”
“Was he a guest?” Stephen asked Gilbert, whose expression, concealed behind a scented rag of his own, hid his reaction to Feyn’s identification.
“He was,” Gilbert said. “Came yesterday. You don’t remember him?”
“I don’t keep track of every guest,” Stephen said.
“I am surprised. He was quite loud. Don’t you remember the uproar during the dice game?”
“I think I’d gone to bed, but I heard there was a commotion. Just a lot of shouting, I thought.”
“Well, it did die down pretty quickly for a game where cheating was alleged.”
“Feyn was cheating?”
“No, he was the accuser. It was another fellow. But nothing came of it. Or so I thought.” Gilbert pushed aside Feyn’s hair with a stick of his own. “Look there. He’s got a knock on the head.”
There was a cut on Feyn’s left brow at the hairline. Stephen bent down to examine it, holding his breath against the stench. “It doesn’t seem to have bled much.” Scalp wounds of that kind usually bled copiously, even when they were minor. Stephen had received and inflicted enough wounds like that during fencing practice to know.
“Which could mean it knocked him silly. The killer dumped him in the privy right after, and he died straightaway.”
“Or he slipped, hit his head, and fell in.”
Gilbert shrugged, admitting the possibility.
“Did anyone see him come out here?” Stephen asked.
No one, especially the staff, who had remained, recalled it.
“It was probably early in the evening,” Stephen mused.
“Why? Gilbert asked.
�
�Because if he had to relieve himself after he retired, he’d have used the chamber pot inside.” Stephen added, “He had a purse, and it looks like it has been cut.”
“A robbery?” Gilbert exclaimed, alarmed. “In my house?”
“I suspect so,” Stephen said. Some impulse made him put out his hand to the wound on Feyn’s forehead. He gently pressed the skin beside the cut. The skull should have felt solid, but instead, the bones beneath the skin yielded to the pressure. “Whoever struck him hit hard enough to break his skull.”
“Oh, dear. Not an accident at all.”
“I think not. Missing purse, broken skull. Hard to explain that except as robbery and murder.”
Gilbert sighed. “I suppose we should have his clothes off, just to be sure that’s all there is. I do so hate this part. When will it ever be your turn?”
“We’ve been over this before. I am the officer. It’s lowly work.”
“A good officer shares in the toils of his men.”
“That depends upon the nature of the toil. What about Mark, there?”
Gilbert knelt by the body and took out his knife. “No, he’d just make a mess of it. And we’d have to listen to him complain the entire time.” He glanced around. “It’s too bad Harry’s gone. We might’ve got him to do it.”
“You’d have had to pay him. Edith might balk after what the Hapgoods cost.”
“Oh, yes. I hadn’t thought of that.”
There being no other apparent alternatives, Gilbert, a grimace spreading across his face, grasped Feyn’s collar and began to cut through his tunic and shirt.
Chapter 6
While Gilbert bent over the corpse, Stephen thought about the quarrel of the previous evening. Quarrels were the most frequent reason for homicides. If the outburst subsided without blows it usually blew over. But some people nursed grudges that they acted on later.
He disengaged from the circle of spectators and made his way to the inn. As it was Friday, washing day, Edith Wistwode was upstairs on the first floor superintending the stripping of the linen covers from the mattresses in the common sleeping room, the large, long room where most guests spent the night. Single rooms were more expensive. This was a menial chore that she did not ordinarily superintend, and she was pacing about snapping at the maids. They all seemed quite grim, the maids for being under Edith’s tongue and Edith for something else.
“I cannot believe this has happened in my house!” Edith burst out when Stephen emerged from the stairway and she caught sight of him. “We shall never live it down! It’s hard enough getting people in as it is! When word gets around, no one will come! No one wants lodgings where their persons or effects are not safe!” She shook a finger at Stephen. “I want you to find the culprit! Without delay!”
Stephen, who had been thinking about doing no more than finishing the inquest and passing the matter off to the undersheriff, blinked at Edith’s attack. “I will do what I can.”
“‘I will do what I can.’ Gilbert says that all the time, and usually I have to have someone clean up after him.” Edith turned and snapped at one of the maids for some transgression in the stacking of the mattresses, although the girl’s mistake was not apparent to Stephen, and apparently not even to the girl, whose eyes and lips narrowed in a sulk. Edith asked Stephen, “What are you doing here? Go out and find the killer!”
“You’ve been listening at the window,” Stephen said.
“What if I have?”
Stephen shrugged, having suspected Edith’s retreat to the inn had been a display of false unconcern. “I need to know who that fellow was who exchanged words with Feyn last night. I’m sure you know him. Nothing escapes your attention.”
Edith drew herself up, which was a feat, owing to her short stature; the top of her head did not even reach Stephen’s shoulder and she seemed almost as wide as she was tall. “His name is Albert de Brereton. Last I saw him, he was headed for the stable.” Her eyes narrowed in thought. “Now that I think about it, he seemed remarkably unconcerned about the discovery of the body. Never went close to see what was up. Went straightway to the stable. Hurry! He might be gone already! Do you think it was him?”
Stephen crossed the yard to the stable limping more than usual from the pain from his bad foot. A riding horse and six pack horses had been tethered to the rings along the stable wall. Four men were tying panniers to the pack horses, one box on each side. The riding horse had already been tacked up, and a fifth man dressed in the decent but worn clothes of a middlingly prosperous merchant stood beside it, an impatient look on his face.
“Are you Albert de Brereton?” Stephen asked.
“What if I am?” the fellow replied, wiping the crumbs of a barley cake from his lips. Brereton’s eyes gave Stephen the up-and-down, weighing and measuring what he saw.
Stephen was used to being assessed like this, conscious of the tattered state of his clothes — the battered maroon hat, green tunic with fraying cuffs, fading blue shirt, patched red stockings — as Brereton tried to guess where he fell on the social ladder. Class distinctions were often subtle, but made a great difference in how people treated each other, for even poor gentry like Stephen were entitled to deference from the richest merchant, although such deference might be colored with disdain, carefully expressed, of course, in ways that were calculated not to give outright offense.
“I would have a few words with you,” Stephen said.
“I’m busy,” Brereton said as he turned to the men loading the pack horses, having decided that Stephen was not worth his notice.
“I want to ask you a few questions about that fellow over there, the one found in the privy.”
“You are being bothersome. Go away.”
“Nonetheless, you will take the time to answer. I am the deputy coroner here.”
“You? It must not be a lucrative position if you’re all they’ve got to fill it.” Nonetheless, because Stephen represented the crown despite his tatty appearance, Brereton turned back, arms crossed, lips downturned. “What do you want?”
“You had words with the deceased last night.”
“I’d hardly call them words.”
“Over a game of dice.”
“He was a little upset at his losses. Threw a tantrum.”
“And you answered him with hard words.”
“I told him to fuck himself, if that’s what you mean. But that was the end of it. I retired for the night and it was over.”
“He accused you of cheating.”
“Losers often do that. How often have you found men willing to take ownership of their own mistakes?”
“I’ll admit, it is a common fault. Nonetheless, he leveled the accusation.”
“And it blew over. These things do, you know.”
“And you never went outside after?”
“Went straight to bed, as I told you. We’ve got to make Shrewsbury today. It’s a long way and we planned to get an early start, which you and all the commotion have now ruined. Can we get back to work?”
“Do you have anyone who can corroborate you?”
Brereton waved at the four men, who had paused in their work to listen to the conversation. It was more interesting than the loading of pack horses. “We all slept together in the common room, there. Are you quite finished?”
“Do you have your own dice?”
Brereton looked taken aback at the unexpected question.
Stephen went on, “I know you have your own. You’ve the look of a gambling man.”
Brereton’s lips compressed. “What if I do? What’s that got to do with anything?”
Stephen held out a hand. “Let me see them.”
Brereton glanced at the four laborers. His hand dipped into his belt pouch, fumbled around, and emerged with a small leather tube that was topped with a leather cap.
Stephen uncapped the tube and upended it. A pair of ivory dice fell into his palm. He rolled the dice in his hand. One of the pack horses wore only a saddle blanket, its saddle
and panniers on the ground beside it. Stephen swept the saddle blanket from the horse and spread it on the ground. He knelt and cast the dice. The first cast turned up a seven and a five, but the next ones came up snake eyes.
He stood up. “I’ll be keeping these, and I’ll be letting every tavern and inn within ten miles know about you, Brereton. You get in a game in my territory and I’ll have the skin off your back.”
Brereton’s lips compressed even more than they had before, and he trembled with rage. But he had been caught out and he said nothing.
“And,” Stephen said, holding out his hand again, “I’ll have your winnings from last night. Although we can’t truly call them winnings, can we?”
Brereton’s hand drifted to the dagger at his hip, and Stephen thought he would refuse and there would be trouble. Stephen’s hand slipped to his own dagger.
“The man no doubt left a widow and children,” Stephen said. “They are entitled to compensation for your cheating.”
Brereton’s nostrils flared, but just when Stephen thought he might draw the dagger, Brereton dug into his pouch for his purse. He loosened the strings and poured silver pennies into his hand. He upended the hand and let the pennies cascade onto Stephen’s palm. “Now get out of my way.”
There were so many pennies that Stephen needed two hands to contain them all. For a moment, he thought with some alarm that this might have been a ruse to tie up his hands for a sudden attack, which he had fallen for like an idiot. But Brereton turned away and snarled at his laborers, “Get those nags loaded!”
A few of the pennies had fallen to the ground. Stephen retrieved them and retreated to the inn.
Gilbert had carved the corpse out of its clothes down to the braise, which Gilbert left intact since there were women in the much diminished crowd, by the time Stephen returned to the privy. Those having meaningful work to do had long since got to it, leaving the gossipmongers to see and report anything of interest.
More unpleasantness awaited, which could not be avoided, for it involved a close examination of the body for other signs of injuries that might have contributed to the death. The examination revealed no marks other than a few old, healing bruises on the arms and an injured thumb, the sort of wound one often saw upon careless carpenters.